Freelance Writer/Editor

Bon Appetit

08 May 2018

Every so often an assignment comes along that takes you out of your typical beat, making you so honored to be a journalist because it allows you to meet wise and captivating people and learn about their work and their passions. This was one of those moments. I got to profile Rukaiyah Adams for Bon Appetit's Healthyish series on "Superpowered Women"—women who are redefining wellness in their communities. As I spoke to Rukaiyah over lunch at her southwest Portland home, I realized that we have a lot in common: she's a runner, she invests in startups run by women and people of color (I don't do that, but I write about them), she loves Oregon wines (particularly Antica Terra) and she longs for our city to be a place where everyone is included in its successes. I learned a lot from interviewing her.

When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”

Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.

“I could make ten times more in New York, but I was past the mastery part,” Adams tells me, as she putters around the kitchen of her 1920s English-cottage-style home, making us lunch. “I needed to develop a point-of-view.” In Portland, she landed a job as director of investment management at the Standard, a financial services group, and, in 2013, was appointed to the board of the Oregon Investment Council, the state pension fund.

Today, Adams, 44, is the chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, the third largest foundation in Oregon, with assets of $788.5 million. Started by Oregon grocery store magnate Fred G. Meyer, the trust gives away roughly $35 million a year to Oregon-based social justice and advocacy organizations, equitable education and affordable housing initiatives, and environmental programs. These grants are only possible due to the success of the Meyer investment portfolio, which Adams manages.

“Rukaiyah is tackling big, thorny, important, often fraught issues,” says Eve Callahan, an executive vice president at Portland-based Umpqua Bank and long-time admirer. “And she’s doing it with such grace and generosity.”

But when I ask her what she does at Meyer, Adam’s reply is pithy: “My job is to make the money.”

Long runs in nature—she loves jogging along the Willamette River as well as in 5,200-acre Forest Park—help keep Adams poised in her high-pressure position. “Believe it or not, being healthy and having outlets is pretty important to the technical requirements of the job,” she says as we sit at her marble kitchen table, eating iceberg lettuce with goat cheese, sliced cucumbers and radishes, and shaved carrots, along with avocado smeared on toasted sourdough. “If the person managing money is pulling out her hair and crying, it generates a lot of stress!”

In high school, she played basketball and soccer, and, at Carleton College in Minnesota, she was passionate about rugby. Running has even spurred radical investment changes that have been good for the Meyer portfolio.

More recently, Adams has shifted Meyer’s strategy from a more traditional one of investing in global markets to mission-related regional investing.

“Historically, Meyer has focused on venture capital and accelerators—which has done quite well,” says Adams. “But, looking back over who has benefitted from that investing, it’s the same people who normally benefit.” Over the past year, Adams has stepped up investments in businesses run by women and people of color. In 2016, she invested $2 million in Nitin Rai’s Elevate Capital, a fund that invests in Pacific Northwest startups led by women and minorities. (Elevate was a seed investor in feminist tomboy clothing company Wildfang as well as in Hue Noir, a makeup company geared to people of color.)

But sexy startups only comprise a small part of Oregon’s economy. “The reality is that most brown people and people of color are employed by small businesses. And we need to grow those businesses,” Adams says. At the moment, Adams has her eye on a few businesses around the state. She’s particularly keen to invest in firms that bridge the urban-rural divide. “They don’t know it, but I’m watching them closely,” Adams says, conspiratorially. “I’m watching how they respond to stress. How they manage their time. How steady they are over time. When you invest in someone, it’s like getting married to them.”

On that subject, on New Year’s Eve, Adams wed Chen in an elegant ceremony at the Parker Palm Springs. Adams paused as she sliced vegetables for our salad to show me some photos: One of her and Chen all dressed up in their wedding best, looking radiant and joyous; one of Adams hugging her mom in front of a decorative concrete screen wall.

Several times during our interview, she tells me with pride what a fabulous cook Chen is. The youngest of three boys (by about a decade), he spent a lot of time at home with his mom, who taught him to be confident in a kitchen. He has a habit of leaving a cookbook lying on the kitchen counter—Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok, for instance, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty—with a note: “Pick a recipe.” Adams grabs the Pok-Pok cookbook and flips to Ricker’s recipe for Vietnamese turmeric-marinated catfish with noodles and herbs, and I glimpse a note she scrawled beneath it commemorating that he made it for her on Valentine’s Day last year. Adams says their division of labor is simple: she takes care of the baking and roasting, and he does all the cooking. (She happily does the dishes.)

Adams also loves Oregon wines, particularly winemaker Maggie Harrison’s Antica Terra. (“All I do is hug the bottles when I get them,” Adams says.) But her weekday routine does not allow for leisurely meals—at least until dinner. Like many other West Coast investors, she’s up by 6:00 a.m. to check the markets. “So even if I’m not at work, I’m working.” If she runs in the morning before work, she’ll grab a yogurt or piece of fruit on her way out the door. “I love those shredded wheat things that have sugar on top, which I probably shouldn’t eat, but they’re delicious,” she says. Once at the Meyer Memorial Trust office in the Pearl District, she’s at her desk for a few hours, and then around 11:00 a.m. she goes for a 20-minute walk. “I usually have to miss lunch, then I have to gobble it standing up at the sink,” she says. In an effort to eat more mindfully, she’s started bringing leftovers. By around 3:00 p.m., she’s ready for a cup of coffee and a walk—without her phone. “I like to smell the city and see people,” says Adams.

Lately, though, she’s working on cutting back. “2018 is going to be the year of no. I have two talks to give this year, and that’s it,” Adams tells me, with what sounds like resolution. But you get a sense that this woman would never be satisfied sitting on the sidelines.

When Adams moved back to Portland in 2011, she found a city in flux. Always a majority-white city, Portland was gentrifying at a rapid clip, with black and brown families being pushed out to the suburbs. A fourth generation Portlander—her great grandmother moved to Portland from Louisiana in the late 1950s—she had already witnessed gentrification first hand. Walnut Park, the neighborhood she grew up in, is now known as the Alberta Arts district.

As we eat, she tells me the devastating history of Lower Albina, better known today as the Rose Quarter. A vibrant African American and immigrant neighborhood full of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches, it was affordable and easily walkable to downtown and the neighborhood known as the garment district (now the Pearl). In the late 1950s, the city declared the area blighted and leveled it, making way for the Interstate, Memorial Coliseum, and a hospital that never materialized. Residents, including Adams’ great grandmother and the German family she rented a room from, were forced to move out. It was an act of racial injustice that many Portlanders are still smarting from.

Adams is now on the board of Albina Vision, a coalition of community leaders and developers that aims to redevelop the Rose Quarter with affordability, equity, and walkability in mind. If Adams and the rest of the Albina Vision board get their way, the Rose Quarter will have a public connection to the Willamette River (right now, the lovely bike-and-pedestrian Eastbank Esplanade ends abruptly at the Steel Bridge), a walkable street grid from the 1950s, and affordable housing as a form of reparations to the families who were displaced.

Adams pauses and her voice drops to a whisper, so that I need to lean in to hear her. “My grandmother wrote in her Bible, ‘Dear God, I hope I’ve made the right decision in bringing my family to this place. And someday, I hope that one of my children has love, meaningful work, and safety.’” says Adams. “And I am that child.”

29 October 2013

Students at West Tisbury School on Martha's Vineyard get fish chowder and fresh veggies (Photo by Elizabeth Cecil)

School cafeteria food gets a bad rap. But the truth is, as the national farm to school movement has
taken off over the past few years, schools have begun sourcing the sort
of high-quality ingredients you see at your local farmers’ market. At
public school lunch rooms around the country, it’s now possible to taste
dishes like shrimp cocktail (with homemade cocktail sauce), grass-fed
burgers with roasted potatoes, and burrito bowls with local veggies and
antibiotic-free chicken. Realizing how vital farm-to-school programs are
to local economies, state governments from Alaska to Texas
are encouraging regional purchasing, in some cases doling out grants to
districts that want to buy more local and regional food.

The Obama administration has stepped up its support, hiring a
director of farm-to-school at the United States Department of
Agriculture and, last fall, allocating $4.5 million in grants to 68 projects that connect school cafeterias with local agricultural producers. In fact, according to just-released Census figures
from the USDA, 38,629 schools across the U.S. are buying local food and
teaching kids where their food comes from. And then there are
nonprofits like FoodCorps,
which deploys idealistic young service members—125 of them at last
count—to 15 states to teach kids about healthy food, instruct them in
gardening and cooking, and help school food directors get more local
food into schools (including, sometimes, the very produce kids grow
themselves).

Since October is National Farm to School Month,
we decided to showcase some of the yummiest locally sourced cafeteria
meals out there. We bet you’ll take a second look at your kid’s
cafeteria—and maybe even join her for lunch some day soon.

Read the rest of my story—and see a slideshow of amazing cafeteria meals from New York City to Tennesee —on BonAppétit.com.

06 August 2013

Sarah Schafer, the chef at Portland, OR's Irving Street Kitchen,
comes from a long line of gardeners. Her grandfather, who lived in
Buffalo, NY, grew orchids in his basement and an array of vegetables in
his backyard. But as Schafer told me recently, he "loved loved loved
tomatoes." Starting at age 15, he planted the heirloom seeds his
mother had saved from her parents, who had grown them in Baden-Baden,
Germany, and he was pleased with the results. To him, the perfect way to
eat them was fresh, sprinkled with salt and a bit of mayonnaise.

Grandfather Schafer saved his seeds religiously, and when Sarah and her
brother were old enough to have gardens of their own, he gave them
seeds. But he never told them what precisely the tomato variety was.

"He
was the kind who never liked to share exactly how he did things," said
chef Schafer. When Schafer, then executive sous chef at Eleven Madison Park,
left New York City for San Francisco and finally had a yard, she sowed a
few of the seeds in five separate dimples of soil, and 15 plants
emerged. The resulting fruit was memorable. "It was that perfect
combination between sweet and acidic," she recalled.

29 April 2013

Last Friday, April 26th, Bon Appetit published my post, which they entitled "Yes, You Can Feed a Family of 3 All Organic On a Food Stamp Budget." I'm re-publishing it here in its entirety, even though some of it will be old hat to those of you who've been reading my installments here.

It was exciting to write about this for a publication that doesn't often cover food justice issues and thus far, the feedback has been positive. I've gotten a few effusive letters from readers who have been on food stamps and also managed to feed their families a healthy, plant-based diet (if not all organic). They were pleased to see such tips on Bon Appetit's site.

A small selection of the produce available at Portland's main farmers' market

Here's the post:

When I tell people that my fiancé, Don, and I did an all-organic food stamp challenge for Lent this year, they are incredulous.

"That must've been impossible, right?" they say. "Organic food is SO expensive!"

But
these doubters were wrong. For six weeks—the entire Lenten period—Don
and I shopped frugally, cooked at home, and went without luxuries like
beer, ice cream, soda, bottled salad dressing, and (horror of horrors!)
Stumptown Coffee. But we ate nourishing, fulfilling meals—some of them
more inspired than what we regularly cook—and I'm proud to report that we stayed within our budget of $526 a month for a family of three, with a few dollars to spare.

A word about our budget. Unlike most people
who take the food stamp challenge, we chose to limit ourselves to the
maximum Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, i.e. food
stamps) allowance for a family of three: $526. (Don's 8-year-old
daughter, Madeleine—who eats a heck of a lot of organic Fuji
apples—lives with us half the time.) Though this put us far ahead of
most Americans who are on SNAP--nearly 60 percent of participating households receive less than the maximum
and are expected to make up the difference with their own income. It
also meant that we couldn't use any "extra" money for groceries. (The
USDA expects SNAP recipients to spend 30 percent of their own resources on groceries.
People who are poor enough to qualify for the maximum benefit spend
proportionately less out of their own pockets on groceries.)

I won't go into all the ground rules here (you can read about them in my first blog post)
except to say we allowed ourselves to use up whatever was already in
our cupboard (or fridge) before the challenge began—organic or not. We
already had olive oil, spices, sour cream, almond butter, and basic
staples like flour, lentils, and rice. That said, we did the challenge
for six weeks (most people, like Cory Booker, do it for a mere week) so we did end up replacing these items during Lent using our lower budget.

How did we manage to stay within our budget? Let me be the first to say
that we have many privileges. We live in southeast Portland, OR, within
walking distance of three full-service grocery stories (Safeway, Fred
Meyer, and a New Seasons),
one gourmet grocery (Pastaworks), and a farm stand/fishmonger's.
Portland is a veritable food oasis—our micro-neighborhood especially
so. Second, Don and I both know our way around the kitchen and love to
cook. Third, I work from home, which makes it easy to roast vegetables,
whip up a batch of pizza dough, or start a soup as I go about my work
day. (Office workers may run errands on their lunch break; I start
preparing dinner.)

That said, with some effort and planning,
eating an entirely organic diet on this budget was not as difficult as
you'd think. A few money-saving tips:

Buy in bulk! Like
practiced hippies, we go to the grocery store armed with old yogurt
containers, which we use for dried beans, quinoa, nuts, pasta, etc. It's
much cheaper than buying packaged staples—plus, you reduce waste.

Look for sales.
We get a circular in the mail each week from New Seasons that trumpets
weekly deals. Organic fuji apples: $1.49 a pound. Organic whole wheat
bread: two loaves, $5. Build your meals around the sale items—and
what's in season.

Shop at the farmers' market. Okay, so we
have some of the country's best farmers' markets in Portland—with
competitive prices. Stick to produce, and you'll be surprised by how much booty you'll walk away with for just $25. (Many farmers' markets nationwide accept food stamps; some even have matching programs that give food stamp shoppers up to $20 extra to spend at the market.)

Buy lower-case "o" organic.
I don't want to cause a major kerfuffle here, but I'm of the opinion
that if you can talk to the farmer and ask her or him whether or not
they use herbicides or pesticides and they look you in the eye and say
they don't, then their produce is just as good as certified organic.
It's often cheaper, too. Eat meat sparingly. We're a
vegetarian household most days, but during the challenge we ate even
less meat (including fish and seafood) than usual. Organic meat and
poultry are a lot more expensive than conventional (as they should be),
but for that reason, we avoided both. One night, Madeleine and I made an exception for New Seasons' grass-fed
ground beef (from a ranch that does not use sub-therapeutic antibiotics);
it was $6 a pound—how could we resist?

Love your leftovers.
Knowing we had no extra money to spare, we made a special effort not to
waste anything. Leftover beans went on top of a salad or into a
garlicky hummus. Cauliflower macaroni and cheese was re-heated for the
next day's lunch. Remnants of last night's salmon went into a hearty
mushroom-and-cheese omelette. Multi-grain waffles (made Saturday
morning) are frozen and re-heated for breakfast throughout the week.
Delicious all!

The
most universally popular meal I made during the challenge was also the
easiest and the cheapest. (Let that be a lesson to us all.) No, not rice
and beans. A baked potato bar! I got the idea from Jenny Rosenstrach
and Andy Ward, who write Bon Appetit's The Providers.

Here's the non-recipe recipe:

Baked Potato Bar

Ingredients

1 russet potato for each person Toppings:
grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, an onion, black beans, cooked
broccoli, sauteed spinach, and anything else you have in your fridge
that might be good on a potato

Preparation

In a 450-degree
oven, bake the potatoes, placing them directly on the oven rack. (No
need to wrap them in foil.) Let bake for 50 minutes or until tender.
Meanwhile, cut the onion into thin slices and cook slowly in about 1/4
cup olive oil in a large skillet over low heat. Season to taste with
salt and pepper. Stir occasionally so onions don't burn. It'll take
20-30 minutes, but the results are astonishing: a sweet, golden brown,
deliciously goopy mass of onion.

When the potatoes are done, slice each one horizontally and butter both halves. Serve with toppings.

The
results surprised me. Don kept saying, "This is so delicious!" And even
picky eater Madeleine "mmmed" as she ate her potato (most of it,
anyway). I agree with Rosenstrach and Ward: The secret is letting the
kids put their own toppings on. Giving them agency makes them more
excited to eat the result. I also served a side of frozen edamame from
Whole Foods.

Total cost of meal: less than $6: $2.50 for 3
organic potatoes at our local farmstand, $3 worth of toppings, and
about 50 cents' worth of edamame.

PreparationCut
the tops off of the heads of garlic and discard. Drizzle each head of
garlic with 1 teaspoon of the olive oil, then sprinkle with a pinch of
salt. Wrap the garlic in parchment paper in one bundle and then wrap in
aluminum foil. Bake in a 400-degree oven for 45-50 minutes; the aroma
will tell you when it's ready. The flesh should be soft and golden
brown. Remove from the oven to cool.

Heat the remaining 2
tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion
and a pinch of salt and sauté until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add
the minced garlic, potatoes, thyme, pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and
sauté for 5 minutes. Pour in 3/4 cup of the broth to deglaze the
skillet, stirring to loosen any bits stuck to the pan. Simmer until
potatoes are tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated. Remove from
heat.

When the garlic is cool enough to handle, squeeze the flesh into a bowl and mash with the back of a spoon to form a paste.

Pour
the remaining 2 1/2 cups of broth into the blender. Add the roasted
garlic and the onion-potato mixture and blend until smooth. Transfer to a
soup pot over low heat and stir in 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cook just until
heated through. You may want to add a spritz of lemon juice, a pinch of
salt, and a drizzle of chive oil.

Lucky for me, everyone--even
Don--loved the garlic soup, which cost $8.75 total to make. Don made a
big green salad ($2 worth of lettuce) with a variety of raw veggies
shaved or sliced on top (50 cents), and we toasted some homemade bread.

PreparationPreheat broiler to high. Place cast-iron skillet on the middle rack of the oven to preheat.Remove
the loose outer leaves of the sprouts and trim the stems. Cut sprouts
in half. In a large bowl, toss the sprouts with olive oil, salt, and
chile flakes. When the skillet begins smoking, add the sprouts and
broil, stirring once or twice, until charred and soft but not burnt,
about 10 to 12 minutes. The amount of time will depend on the sprouts
themselves, as they change throughout the season. Toss cooked sprouts in
a bowl with lemon juice, more olive oil, and a pinch of sea salt. Serve
immediately.

10 April 2013

No one really knows why celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small
intestine that's caused by eating gluten, and gluten sensitivities are
on the rise. But celiac disease researchers and plant geneticists have
some solid theories, one of which is the abbreviated fermentation times
used at industrial bakeries.

"Most of the plastic-wrap bread you find at grocery stores is made very
quickly with yeast--it goes from flour to plastic-wrap in three hours or
less," says Stephen Jones, a wheat breeder who is the director
of the Washington State University Research Center at Mount Vernon.

What
that means is that gluten proteins don't have time to break down as
they would in a bread made by traditional methods, where fermentation
takes place over 18 to 25 hours, and that makes it harder to digest.
It's possible, celiac experts theorize, that after years of eating
highly processed bread, our guts are rejecting it.

Thankfully, there's a resurgence of craft bakeries around the country
that make bread the old-fashioned way. All of these bakeries ferment
their dough with wild yeasts for at least 12-15 hours—often much
longer. This not only improves the digestibility of the bread but also
lowers its glycemic index. All of these bakers also use "whole-milled"
whole wheat flour—that is, flour that's been milled from its intact
state. (To make white flour, industrial mills separate the endosperm
from the more nutritious bran and germ. They add them back for whole
wheat flour, but some craft bakers speculate that the germ, which goes
rancid quickly when removed from the endosperm, is either not added back
or is "denatured.") Some of these bakers even mill their own whole
wheat flour in-house.

This Northwest bakery, with ten locations in
Seattle and Portland, ferments loaves for at least 12 hours. Portland
head baker Sean Coyne, a Per Se alumnus, just launched a 100 percent
whole-grain bread made from whole-milled whole wheat, emmer, spelt, and
rye flours. The lighter Goldendale loaf (made with 68 percent whole
wheat) is perfect for sandwiches. All the whole grain flours are milled
at Camas Country Mill in Eugene, OR.

Unlike most bakers, Craig
Ponsford uses 100 percent whole-wheat flour for all his breads--even the
challah, which is made of hard white whole wheat. (His croissants and
pain au chocolat are made of a whole-milled whole wheat flour that has 5
percent of the bran sifted off.) All the flour--used for loaves such as
American whole wheat, sourdough walnut, and pumpernickel--has been
whole-milled at Certified Foods in Woodland, CA.

This five-month-old restaurant
and bakery carries marvelously flavorful loaves such as buckwheat
baguettes (made with buckwheat, rye, whole wheat, and white flour) and
spelt ciabatta (made with 85 percent spelt and 15 percent white flour).
The man behind the magic is baker Peter Endriss, who uses only
organic flour, much of it milled at Farmer Ground in Trumansburg, NY.
Most loaves here undergo an overnight fermentation and even the brioche
and croissants contain some whole wheat flour.

Like Grand Central Bakery, this
six-month-old Portland bakery sources its whole wheat, rye, and spelt
from Eugene's Camas Country Mill. Instead of buying it pre-milled,
however, baker Cory Mast mills it on-site in an Austrian-made
Osttiroler stone mill. (The organic white flour, which is pre-milled,
comes from Central Milling in Utah.) The dough ferments for three hours
in the morning and then is shaped, put into baskets, and fermented in
the walk-in overnight. In the morning, Mast bakes kamut baguettes and
enormous boules of red fife (an heirloom whole wheat varietal) in a
wood-fire oven. Coming soon: polenta bread made with corn from Ayers
Creek Farm.

Chad Robertson has achieved
rock star status for his authentic long-fermented loaves of whole wheat,
walnut, sesame, sourdough, and olive. He uses whole-milled organic
flour from Central Milling and lets his dough leaven for as long as 30
hours. Ever since his wife, Elizabeth Pruitt, became
gluten-intolerant, Robertson has also been experimenting with
easier-to-digest ancient grains like einkorn, emmer, kamut, and spelt.

PREPARATION:
Prepare levain with equal parts water and flour and 25 percent old
starter 12 hours before mixing the dough. Leave to ferment at room
temperature.

Mix together white bread flour, whole wheat flour, and cold water until
combined and let sit for 30 minutes. Add all remaining ingredients
except walnuts and mix on low speed until combined, and then medium
speed for 1 minute to develop a little strength. Mix walnuts in on low
speed just until combined.

Put dough in a lightly oiled bowl and let ferment at room temperature
for 1-2 hours (longer if room is cooler, shorter if room is warm). Fold
all four corners of the dough into the center and flip over in bowl.
Cover and place in refrigerator for at least 12 hours, up to 24 hours.

Two hours before you'd like to bake, remove the dough from the
refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature for 1 hour. Divide
dough into 2 pieces (about 1 pound each) and shape into boules or
batards. Place on floured board or sheet tray, cover and allow to proof
for 1 hour. Halfway through the final proof (and 30 minutes before
you're ready to bake), preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit with a
baking stone on the lowest rack of the oven. Score loaves and place on
stone. Throw a few pieces of ice onto the floor of the oven, quickly
close the door (be careful for steam!) and bake for 20-30 minutes, to
deep golden brown. Cool completely on wire racks before cutting and
enjoying.

Note: This recipe has not been tested by the Bon Appétit test kitchen.

11 February 2013

The grapes used in Big Table Farm's Wirtz Pinot Gris sit on skins for up to 10 days. The result? A full-bodied and luscious wine that's amazing with seafood.

On a trip to Slovenia several years ago, I tasted a butterscotch-hued wine that blew my mind. I was visiting winemaker Branko Cotar,
in the sleepy village of Gorjansko, not three miles from the Adriatic
Sea. Though the Vitovska Grganja I was sipping looked (sort of) like a
white wine, it had the full-bodied, tannic taste of a red. In the depths
of his cobweb-filled cellar, Cotar, a burly man with an impressive
mustache, let me in on his secret: He'd made this wine by allowing the
grapes to macerate in their skins for two weeks, a technique that's
typically used only with red wines.

And though these wines, frequently
dubbed "orange wines" for their copper color, are an acquired
taste--they have a funky nose and often a cider-like zing--they've
caught on at restaurants, too. Michael Garofola, sommelier and manager at Portland's Genoa
restaurant fell in love with skin-fermented whites when he tried
Radikon's Oslavje at a dinner party. Now he makes sure there's always an
orange wine on the tasting menu at Genoa, so he can introduce diners to
them one glass at a time. (The Old World orange wines are not
inexpensive, ranging from $63 for Monastero Suore Cisterencensi
"Rusticum" '09 to $205 for Gravner's "Breg" '04, so it's best if diners
know what they're in store for.) Last fall, Garofola organized a
five-course "orange wine dinner" at Genoa with bottles from Movia,
Radikon, and Gravner, among others. Because there's no protocol for what
to pair with orange wines, Garofola says he just opened all five
bottles at once and threw them on the table.

"There was a lot of debate about which was best with which foods," says
Garofola. The dinner began with a savory baked romanesco broccoli
custard with black truffles and spicy mustard greens and culminated with
a braised pork belly and smoked tenderloin with braised cabbage,
apples, and pickled mustard seed.

Guest David Speer, sommelier and owner of both Portland's Red Slate Wine
and Ambonnay champagne bar, said the Gravner--which gets a whopping
nine months of skin contact--went best with the pork. "The Gravner was
the biggest and boldest and needed to have bold flavors around it,"
recalls Speer. The Radikon, on the other hand, was more versatile. "Over
the course of the night the Radikon would shift and change. It worked
almost with everything."

At Genoa, Garofola is currently pairing a Coenobium 2010 with an
Insalata di Carota, cooked with alfalfa hay and topped with mascarpone.

At L'Apicio in New York
City, sommelier Joe Campanale always has an orange wine by-the-glass.
(He also has them on the menu at his two other restaurants, dell'Anima
and Anfora.)

"If you have a dish that you'd normally want to pair with a
light red or a rich white, an orange wine would be a good in-between,"
Campanale says. But because of its tannin-acid structure, he agrees
with Garofola. "It does really well with pork."

Skin-fermented whites are not, however, universally acclaimed as
alluring and profound. Some critics, in fact, complain that they're not
only technically flawed but also an annoying fad. In a recent blog for Inside Scoop,
Jon Bonné, the San Francisco Chronicle's wine editor, railed against
orange wines ("less oxidized than murky or beset with microbial flaws")
but then singled out a few he thinks are worth drinking: La Stoppa Ageno
from Elena Pantoleoni and, in the U.S., the 2011 Pinot Gris from Wind
Gap and the Prince in His Caves from Abe Schoener's Scholium Project.
(Bonné found it "more refined than ever.")

But at restaurants
like L'Apicio and Genoa, diners order them all the time. "We've always
done well with them," says Campanale, who likes the theater of decanting
orange wines. "The way they look is so impressive. And a lot of them do
get better in the decanter."